Parade to the Black

In four years Marshall Field has poured more than $10,000,000 into his papers: New York City's pinkish PM, the New Dealish Chicago Sun and the politically colorless syndicated Sunday supplement Parade. This week he was getting a few tiny drops in return. Parade, least talked about but most widely read, was the first Field publication to go into the black. (Field's reported investment is $1 1/2 millions.)*

Parade, almost three years old, is a picture-laden, 28-page, magazine-like supplement distributed in 15 cities. It is dissociated from other Field publications, except that Chicago's Sun is a customer. Parade is unusual in two respects: 1) Editor Ross Art Lasley and his top associates (Boyd Brodhead and Harold H. Funk) have had no other newspaper or magazine experience; 2) the gravure-printed supplement gets an extreme degree of editing by its readers.

Yale-trained Editor Lasley is also head of a research firm, which makes readership surveys for other magazines and advertisers. Parade constantly investigates how many of its readers read what, and how much of it. Example: a batch of ten humorous drawings is submitted to 100 or more random persons in several cities. The top three in such a popularity poll will be those Parade prints.

One key finding has been that a story told entirely in pictures and short captions rates top readership. This fact was worked into a cinema-in-print formula by Parade's former managing editor Fred Sparks, who left for Look early this year. With such devices, Parade reached a 2,000,000 circulation in newspapers within six months. It has since been stymied there behind the paper shortage, but advertising lately has been on the rise.

* Last week Publisher Field bought a money maker: Cincinnati's Radio Station WSAI (5,000 watts, Blue Network), for upwards of $525,000 --subject to approval of the Federal Communications Commission, which had ordered WSAI divorced from Crosley Corp. and its superpowered (50,000 watts) Station WLW.

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